Button-Pusher

The seductive dystopia of “Black Mirror.”

“Lip-read reconstruction: enabled,” a Siri-like voice says. The jealous husband has exactly what he needs—the ability to scrutinize his wife flirting with another man. Frantically, he rewinds his memories, which are stored in a “grain” implanted behind his ear. An update on “The Twilight Zone” for the digital age, “Black Mirror,” a dystopian drama created by Charlie Brooker for Britain’s Channel 4, has a swagger to its strangeness, a swallow-the-red-pill, anything-can-happen audacity. For a full day after watching the first episode (which I obtained through occult means, before Netﬂix made the show available to U.S. viewers), I felt disoriented, dropped on a new planet.

Still, for all the show’s inventive storytelling, its true provocation is its righteous outrage, which shares something with Mike White’s whistle-blower series “Enlightened,” although it’s overlaid with a dark filter. Like “Enlightened,” “Black Mirror” is about love in the time of global corporate hegemony. It’s a bleak fairy tale that doubles as an exposé. An anthology series, it consists of six one-hour episodes spanning two seasons (plus a Christmas special), each with a new story and a different cast. In various future settings, Brooker’s characters gaze into handhelds or at TV-walled cells, using torqued versions of modern devices. In one episode, a couple has sex while stupefied by virtual visions of earlier, better sex. In another, a woman builds a replica of her husband from his photos and posts on social media. In a third, workers watch streaming schlock and are docked points if they shut their eyes. Some plots deal with political terrorism (or performance art—on this show, there’s little difference) and the criminal-justice system; there are warped versions of reality TV. Though the episodes vary in tone, several have a Brechtian aggression: the viral video “Too Many Cooks” would fit right in. But, in even the most perverse installments, there’s a delicacy, a humane concern at how easily our private desires can be mined in the pursuit of profit. The worlds can be cartoonish, but the characters are not.

Back when Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone” aired, in the fifties and sixties, it was an oasis in a bland era. Through sci-fi metaphor, Serling could talk about civil rights and the Red Scare without the censors stepping in. His endings could be unhappy, even nihilistic—a break with the industry’s feel-good ways. Brooker has a lot in common with Serling: he’s an absurdist, with a taste for morality plays and horror shows. He knows how to land a punch. Yet he’s responding to a very different media environment, one that is saturated with “edginess,” from sexy torture scenes to cynical satire. “Black Mirror” slices at this material from several angles, critiquing the seductions of life lived through a screen. It’s an approach that could easily turn pedantic—just another op-ed about Tinder-cruising millennials—but it never does. Because Brooker is an insider, with a deep and imaginative understanding of tech culture, he doesn’t come off as “The Simpsons” ’s “Old Man Yells at Cloud” (or Aaron Sorkin, his representative here on earth). He can’t condescend to those who rely on their devices, because he’s so clearly one of us.

One difficulty in writing about “Black Mirror,” however, is that it relies on O. Henry-level plot twists, which is why this paragraph’s first sentence is an elaborate “spoiler alert,” written with enough dependent clauses to give you sufficient time to put this review aside and move on, so that I can talk about a few of the episodes in greater detail. O.K., then! There has been a divisive response to the show’s first episode, “The National Anthem,” which a few viewers called, to use the worst yet most appropriate word, “ham-handed.” The plot is simple. A beloved British princess is kidnapped. The Prime Minister is woken up in the middle of the night and shown a ransom video. “What do they want?” he asks, bleary, still in his bathrobe. “Money? Release a jihadi?” After some throat-clearing, his aides hit Play. “At 4 P.M. this afternoon, Prime Minister Michael Callow must appear on live British television, on all networks, terrestrial and satellites,” the princess says, weeping as she reads the statement. “And have full, unsimulated sexual intercourse with a pig.”

Aghast, the Prime Minister says that of course he won’t do it—and that this must be negotiated privately. He’s living in the past: the video is on YouTube. As soon as it’s banned, it’s duplicated. No matter how many injunctions the government places on TV news, the video still trends on Twitter. The pig-fucking plot seems as crass as can be, but as the episode progresses Brooker ups the ante—step by step, the Prime Minister’s team tries to evade the rules, to trace the blackmailer, all while surfing media response. One news producer resists airing the story, only to find that his competitors have already done so, then clutches his head, saying, “Oh, God, this planet.” He swiftly reels off assignments: “Simon, set tone with Standards and Practices. We need to explain this without viewers sicking up their Weetabix. Lorcan! The Internet aspect, new paradigm, Twitter, the Arab Spring, all that bibble.” Cable-news polls ask, “Would you watch?,” while excerpts from tweets float above footage of the sobbing princess.

The story is ugly and hilarious and beautifully paced, but, like all of “Black Mirror,” it works because it’s not cynical about emotion. The Prime Minister’s abject terror is the story’s engine, along with the impact on his wife, who obsessively reads the YouTube comments. “Everyone is laughing at us,” she tells him. “It’s already happening in their heads.” Cunningly, the camera returns, repeatedly, to shots of viewers watching the news: a couple in bed, interns in a hospital, employees at a pub. They grimace and make smutty cracks; they talk pretentiously about Dogme 95. They’re sad and angry, but of course they’re also titillated—who wouldn’t be? None of this is purely realistic, but it pinpoints something repellent about our appetites, the way that even the photographs from Abu Ghraib became, within weeks, a dirty joke. In the final scenes, Brooker makes an uncompromising move: rather than play coy about the outcome, he forces us to be the audience. In an excruciating sequence, we watch the Prime Minister enter a room with a pig, lower his pants, and begin the act, and then we watch as Britain watches, the camera lingering on a diversity of faces, their varied expressions crumpling into united despair. Subtlety would have been the wrong approach for this type of story. In an era of ironized jabs, there’s something refreshing about a creator who’s willing to underline his point in furious black marker.

The same is true of the second episode, “Fifteen Million Merits,” a Stygian tale of an immersively “gamified” society in which young lovers see a televised singing competition as their only possibility for escape. (The episode also happens to be the most searing anti-pornography narrative since Andrea Dworkin’s “Mercy.”) Two quieter stories about marriage and love, “The Entire History of You” and “Be Right Back,” are equally strong, and, while I won’t describe “The White Bear,” it’s still giving me nightmares. The final episode of Season 2, “The Waldo Moment,” is a multilayered masterpiece about a self-loathing comedian (the exemplary Daniel Rigby) who plays a shock-jock cartoon avatar, Waldo the Bear. When he reluctantly runs for political office, as a publicity prank, he discovers to his alarm how easy it is to wreck the system with facile dick jokes and cheap sarcasm. “I’m not dumb or clever enough to be political,” he complains, but the machine he’s in is already rolling and can’t be stopped.

Anyone who has skimmed Guy Debord’s Wikipedia page or watched the American Music Awards could condemn our culture as a masquerade, a spectacle of virtuality. But what’s refreshing about “Black Mirror” is that Brooker goes deeper than that, aiming past the obvious targets—the know-nothings and narcissists of the Internet. Instead, his villains are the bad-faith cynics, like the reality-TV judge, in one episode, who murmurs, with cagey calculation, “Authenticity is in woefully short supply.” In “Black Mirror,” the danger is not complacency, or, at least, not that alone: it’s letting your outrage turn into contempt, a pose of transgression that is, in the end, more deadly than any desperation to be loved. ♦

Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker’s television critic, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for criticism.